Determinism vs. Free Will: why care in the everyday world?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Cause and effect is one way of looking at things: the reason that x happened is that y caused x

Choice and intentionality is a different way of looking at things: the reason that I did X is that on the basis of Y and because of the absence of z and so forth I chose to do X (and nothing got in my way and stopped me from doing so).

I only place free will in opposition to absolute determinism, and what I mean by absolute determinism is the position that “because it is true that y caused x, it is bullshit that you chose to do x and that x happened because you chose it; that’s an illusion, the truth is determinism”.

Warning: analogy ahead

When asked what this little bonsai tree on my desk really is, I can answer that it is an organism and give genus and species; or I can state that it is a complex of chemical interactions; or that it is a set of the following atoms each of which has a physical location and a relationship of connectivity and interaction with the atoms surrounding it; or that it is a composite of interactions between subatomic particles with energy levels and behaviors as specified thusly, etc etc. None of those explanations is false. Hence the truth of any given one of them does not negate the truth of any of the others. Any appearance that they are mutually contradictory is an illusory appearance.

/corny analogy

I don’t consider myself to possess free will in a sense that yonder kitty cat does not. I’m not even disposed to say that I possess free will in a sense that the bonsai tree does not. If there are pervasive illusions that I don’t think we’ve finished unravelling, the central one may be “who is the self”. I strongly suspect it resides in interactivity rather than existing in individual bodies, but whatever the self actually is, it is conscious and it does things on purpose and not as a result of something else causing it. That’s what I mean by free will. I can’t say whether what other folks mean when they speak of free will is entirely compatible; I don’t respect their right to patent the phrase and it’s a plain English phrase and I’m allowed to interpret it as such.

62

Yes.

But they have no choice …

:slight_smile:

63

That’s what I’m saying: that on BOTH sides of this discussion, does it not often seem as if the other side (which for you would be the free will folks and for me would be the determinists) is using the same words quite differently?

This seems more apparent than ever after having read your latest reply to me. You don’t know what I’m talking about. And me, I’m staring at your words going “huh? wtf??!”

64

What I would say (and have said, before, in other discussions) is that it seems obvious to me that either I have free will, or I have the illusion of free will; but I don’t know any way of distinguishing which of those is actually the case.

65

[QUOTE=monstro]
I don’t know what you mean be “cause of the context”.
[/quote]

Let’s start there.

Determinist: You say you have free will but the cause of your behavior X is stimulus Y which is why you did X.

Me: Stimulus Y is part of my context and as such it is as much the result of my prior actions as it is the cause of my current actions. And to whatever extent I caused Y, Y is not separate from who I am and therefore its actions on me are part of me being me. It’s not an external stimulus at all.
However, I am actually not the cause of Y. If I were, there would be an entirely deterministic relationship between Y and me and my behaviors, just reversed from the determinist’s original model.

Y could be one stimulus or one factor but we could also consider my entire context, everything that is not uniquely me but interacts with me, to be Y. So Y would be all the other people with whom I interact, along with the kitty cat and the weather and the flu viruses and the chair in which I sit and so on and so forth. Everything that could and does interact with me, everything that I could take into account in any of the choices and decisions that I make.

The causal relationship is mutual and reverberates interactively. The classical deterministic analysis says Y causes my behavior. The alarm clock is why I woke up. My hunger is why I ate. The sale on beef is why I purchased the specific things I will eat. My irritation with monstro’s assertions is why I am composing this post. Etc. And all of that is wrong. Because Y does not cause my behavior, insofar as I have caused Y to the same extent that Y has caused me. In and amongst all this mutual interaction is will, intentionality, volition, the process of doing things on purpose. The overally situation is here on purpose and not merely because something else caused it.

66

I see Free Will (or volition) as being a little like steering a supertanker. We can’t just up and decide to make any wild-ass decision conceivable. That’s why losing weight is so damn hard! It takes effort to make the necessary diet and exercise choices.

But many of us actually do make those choices. To say, “No, you didn’t choose to diet and exercise; that was pre-determined in the Jurassic Era” is absurd.

(I don’t know if anyone here is actually claiming full Newtonian determinism. Probably not, as quantum uncertainty demolishes it. The word “determinism” has a number of definitions, some contradicting others. Also, some uses of the word are contradictory to ordinary, everyday, common-sense usage. For instance, the radioactive decay of an atom is random, and yet, in physics, such an event is “deterministic.” The word just doesn’t mean what Joe Internet means by it.)

67

So you never have moments when you simply cannot fathom how you came to a particular decision?

You’ve never gone on automatic, making choices without actually being aware of them?

You’ve never had thoughts or feelings that seemed to pop out of nowhere?

You’ve never been under the influence of drugs?

Never noticed that your behavior changes when your sick or ill?

These things aren’t proof of determinism. But they are evidence against free will.

The only thing that points to the existence of free will is that people generally can distinguish voluntary from involuntary actions. But my cat could probably do the same thing, if he could speak. Drunk people and mentally ill people also have this ability. And yet we generally reserve “free will” for people of sound, mature mind. If voluntary = free will, it’s not that special.

68

No, they are evidence against totally free will. As I’ve been saying for years now in these threads, free will is not absolute. Losing weight is hard. Sometimes we lose our tempers, or succumb to temptation, or do things we damn well know are wrong. Free will has limitations.

That doesn’t prove it doesn’t exist; it only suggests it has internal components and mechanisms that work in complicated ways. (Thank you, Sigmund Freud.)

69

Of course, by my and what I have always understood to be the standard use of the phrase “free will”, you are right.

I’ll return to the evolutionary perspective. At some point minds became complex enough that they experienced senses of self and of agency. I doubt that humans are unique in its possession but there are of course matters of degree. We of course are also the result of evolution (hereditary and cultural both) and both hard-wired and predisposed in various ways. Agency, the experience of free will, an internalized locus of control, the ability to exert self-control and delay gratification, and more, are all requisite for us to be successful individuals.

The OP asked basically what’s the good of the debate - I can rephrase it as noting the harms. The harms come from those who do somehow belief that one or the other are reality and who then take those beliefs to antisocial ends.

Can’t say I know any of these mythic free will folk who use that as a philosophic underpinning to have no empathy for the problems of others, including those arising out of their brains’ wirings, but if they existed that would be a problem. Can’t say I met anyone who would say that they do not need to be empathic or generous because it is determined already what will be and that they are not responsible for how they act, but if a belief determinism led to that, also a problem.

The experienced worlds our minds exist emergent of the experiences of Free Will. They are both the result of lots of information processing going on under the hood with electrical firing and chemical shuttling and patterns of activity reverberating, and they are both very real.

The ideal of being able to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference, requires some internalization of both free will and determinism as concepts but need not require them to be articulated as such.

70

The weight of the evidence points to us not having free will–total or otherwise.

We have plenty evidence of volition, though. I guess I don’t see why this isn’t good enough. What does “free will” give you that “volition” doesn’t?

If you’re a religious person, does the supernatural entity you worship distinguish the two things, in your opinion?

71

I can’t agree with this. However…

As far as I’m concerned, the two are the same. I have volition, and so I have free will. There are limits to this; there are choices I’m simply not able to make. (In abstract theory, I could take up playing the saxophone, right now. My neighbors will be happy to know I won’t…and, really, I can’t. It isn’t a choice I can make.)

Personally, I’m not in the least religious, so I don’t have any answer for that’n.

72

Squee. This makes sense to me. Noting the harms, eh?

What a great summary of all this. Sorry, per the other threads reference, you have had to keep repeating yourself. You kicked butt in the Spinoza thread I started, too. Thanks for helping the self-taught here.

73

For me me also these terms are synonyms. In fact I’d like to hear from anyone who ascribes to free will viewpoint for whom they are somehow not synonymous, and ask that such person elaborate on what the heck you mean when you say “free will” (and “volition” and how they’re different).

74

Volition isn’t the same thing as free will, in my opinion (and this happens not to be just my opinion).

Society routinely denies animals, children, and the mentally ill/disabled “free will”, while granting that they have volition.

When a person is drunk, their"free will" is said to be compromised. Even though they are full of volition. (Drunk drivers are not coerced by anyone to get behind the wheel.)

In my opinion, equating the two makes anti-Free Willers sound unfairly unreasonable. Determinists do not deny that individuals operate in accordance with their conscious desires. I’m eating breakfast right now because I am consciously aware that I am hungry. If I were to stop eating right around the time when I no longer felt hungry, my consciousness would cosign this because it would make sense. It would feel 100% voluntary.

But this isn’t me being “willful”. If it was, you would be able to find me eating regardless of how my body feels and the pressures around me to NOT eat. And my dietary choices would be made independent of the choices presented to me by my reptilian brain. If I had free will, you could righteously yell at me for eating the apple rather than all the other fruits in the garden because you would know for an absolute fact that those other fruits were in my cognitive awareness at the moment I made my decision.

If I had free will, I would choose to eat the apple not because my reptilian brain likes shiny red novel objects, having evolved to seek such things out. I would choose to eat the apple because the me-that-exists-apart-from-my-brain wants that apple, and it has deliberated long and hard and has decided that the upsides to this choice outweigh the downsides.

I could be hypnotized to eat the apple and sincerely believe that I am carrying out the action because I want to. It would feel like an act of volition because it would be. But it wouldn’t be an act of free will.

Equating volition to free will “dumbs down” the entire debate and makes it rather meaningless, IMHO.

75

[QUOTE=monstro]
Determinists do not deny that individuals operate in accordance with their conscious desires
[/quote]

Interestinger and interestinger. Really??

My understanding of determinism is that it says “Your (so-called, illusory) ‘conscious desires’ are completely irrelevant to why and how you operate. You actually operate as a response to external stimuli.” See, for example. B. F. Skinner.

I don’t consider that someone’s free will is compromised just because they’re tripping acid or something. If their intentionality is the explantion for their behavior, that’s free will in my book.

76

Correct.

I can tell myself that I’m eating breakfast because I feel hungry. And I certainly do feel that hunger. No one can convince it’s not there. But the “I’m eating because I’m hungry” notion could be a “just so” story that my brain has fed me. My brain creates the sensation of hunger. It also has the power to direct me to eat. For all I know, I’m eating because I’m afraid, and the hunger sensation is how fear gets manifested when the proximate trigger isn’t revealed through my conscious. And I wouldn’t know any of this because I lack the proper vantage point.

But I am certainly eating under my own volition. No one has forced me to eat. The thought to eat feels like a self-generated thought–not like something injected into my mind by the CIA. I can easily discern my eating activity from my digestive processes, which are not under my volition. So yeah. Eating breakfast is a completely mundane demonstration of volition. But it is not necessarily an act of free will.

So what would be a compromised free will to you?

Can a person have compromised free will unbeknownst to them? Or should we just take their word for it when they say they possess it? In other words, if anyone can say they have free will, then why does society go through so much trouble determining who does not have it? Why is it even a “thing”?

Should a person always trust their own “intentionality”? Do you think it is possible that a person can be deceived by their senses and by the information fed to them by their brain?

77

Let me clarify this before I forget, because it is not worded as precisely as it should be.

Determinists don’t deny that individuals have conscious desires that are consistent with their actions. Actions and desires line up almost always. This is irrefutable. But that is not evidence of the former causing the latter.

Determinists disagree with the Free Willers on whether a person’s conscious desires are a reliable indicator of why a person committed a certain action. A Free Willer trusts another Free Willer to be able to accurately describe their decision tree. A Determinant would say that no one can be trusted to do this, since it is impossible for an individual to know how their decision tree was constructed, since it’s not being constructed consciously but rather unconsciously.

78

This doesn’t make sense: free will is a property of being human. Yeah, you can lock someone in prison, and that means they don’t have the “choice” of driving to the supermarket, but they can still choose to desire it.

Both their will and their volition (and I use the two synonymously) are impaired. They used both volition and will to get drunk, and to ignore safety rules of which they must certainly be aware.

Not “unfairly unreasonable,” just using different definitions. I think their definitions make my viewpoints appear unfairly unreasonable: they’re accusing me of believing in some kind of magic, operating outside of physical laws. I do not.

Also unconscious desires; the unconscious mind is extremely instrumental in our decision-making.

Cool. This doesn’t contradict my views in any way.

That’s called dieting, and it’s hard. The reptilian brain is screaming “I’m hungry!” and the dieter has to overcome that strong impetus.

This doesn’t highlight any difference between will and volition. You made a decision which fruit to eat: why do you say it was an act of will, but not an act of volition?

Same problem: this doesn’t address the difference between the two ideas.

It wouldn’t be an act of volition, but a coerced action. As you say, it would feel like an act of volition, but would not actually be one. If a bad guy disguises himself as a nice lady’s husband, and has sex with her, she is consenting to the sex, but it is still an act of rape.

Shrug: in my opinion it is all rather meaningless. Some determinists deny that we are able to make intentional choices, and that our actions are pre-determined, either on a scale of seconds or on a much larger time-scale. Some of them say we don’t have volition, but only an illusion, and that we cannot truly “choose” our actions, but merely have them thrust upon us by outside forces.

Me, I think that’s untrue, although I have always pointed out that our decisions are influenced by outside forces. If I’m out buying groceries, my choices are likely to be different if I’m really hungry. I still am able to make choices. Some determinists say, no, I’m not making choices, ever. Those are the guys I’m mostly disagreeing with.

79

Well thank you and not just for kind words but for creating these threads and trying to keep them civil and on track. That Spinoza thread was a fun conversation and one of the best we’ve been able to have on Spinoza that I ever recall. Malthus really held court there! I am just relieved that I have not contradicted myself too much between here and there.

Meanwhile this thread illustrates a common problem with discussions of Free Will and Determinism - a lack of much consensus on what the terms mean and imply and as a consequence an eagerness in some to make declarations about what “Free Willers” or “Determinants” think and believe rather than to engage in a dialogue that fosters understanding about what they personally believe and what others think.

The wiki entry on Free Will is IMHO actually a pretty good overview and gives a sense of why so many talk past each other so much in these discussions. The discussion there about the difference between explanation and exculpation, and the effects of the belief, the impact of diminished sense of free will, as they defined it, as increasing fatalism with negative impacts, are both of particular relevance to this thread.

80

THIS makes no sense.

Who says free will is a property of humans? What is the proof of this?

“Choosing to desire” is something no one does. A person either desires something or they don’t. A person cannot will themselves to feel a certain way.

So you are saying a drunk driver doesn’t choose to get behind the wheel? If he or she is not making this choice, who is?

You may not think you’re making an appeal to magic, but your assertion–that you possess the ability to make decisions completely free of your biology–would require magic to be true.

But they don’t overcome it necessarily through will. It is much more logical and likely that a person overrides one impulse only when they experience a stronger, more compelling impulse.

One part of my reptilian brain may really really want me to scratch my crotch out in public. But another part wants to avoid the social embarrassment that would surely follow. It’s not like I choose to listen to this part of my brain more than the other. Rather, it’s just the case that the more inhibited part of my brain is stronger than the disinhibited side–at least most of the the time–and makes it so that I’m not even aware that I even have the desire to scratch.

I mean, think about how many decisions and choices you make over the course of a day. Are you deliberating over each one? Or are they just kinda happening without you really being aware of them?

You’ve confused the two things.

If someone were to hypnotize me to choose an apple whenever they flash the lights, and then you asked me if I had made that choice under my own volition, I’d say yes. Because it would seem like a voluntary act from my vantage point. And I’d likely say I chose the apple because I like apples and I’m hungry, duh. I probably would NOT say that I chose the apple because someone planted the thought in my head.

If a person cannot accurately describe the processes that led to their specific decisions, then how can they say that they consciously authored those decisions? How can they purport to have the ability to act independent of external variables if they don’t know when those external variables are coming into play?

To say our decisions are merely influenced by outside forces presumes that you can make a decision independent of outside forces. This is something that has yet to be proven. I don’t see how useful it is to presume it is exists just because people say it exists based on their feelings. Feelings are notoriously unreliable.